It was then that I heard my mother say, in a flat matter-of fact tone, that if Sharon ever became Prime Minister she would commit suicide.
Births and deaths, triumphs and tragedies are rendered in a flat, matter-of-fact affect that mirrors the midwestern landscape, language and temperament".
"I've been through a lot in the last few weeks that I'm sure most of you know about," she said, with a trace of flat, matter-of-fact West Virginia mining country in her speech.
She is no doubt sincere in her denunciations of child abuse and war crimes, yet she is hardly alone in feeling horrified by these things and a flat, matter-of-fact style, even if ironically intended, is not the best way to handle these subjects in imaginative fiction.
The libretto by Christopher Hampton expertly fillets the original text, and its rather flat, matter-of-fact dialogue not only seems to capture the essence of Kafka's strange, surreal fable about the hapless Josef K, who finds himself arrested and accused of unspecified crimes, but also turns out to be perfectly tailored to Glass's straightforward syllabic word setting.
Now, when Fonda discusses her mother, she does so either in a flat, matter-of-fact tone (in her memoir, she writes, "Mother had killed herself ten months before a new house she'd been building for us was finished. It was April and I guess she couldn't wait") or in a language that's baroque and unreal ("My mother? She was a golden thread running through our lives").
Simple black-and-white drawings scattered throughout the book (which was designed by Spiegelman), the images have the flat, matter-of-fact look of wood-cuts and chart the unfolding story in a highly literal fashion.
"If I had died, my family would be O.K.," Mr. Salim said, his voice flat and matter of fact.
Ultimately, we discuss what 3D shapes could be achieved through shape-shifting from flat soft matter and identify multiple areas of application.
